The Interactive Services Detection will now bring up a dialog (probably in the background) where it asks you to “View the message” in order to display the service session where the command window will run.

Run echo %userprofile% to see where your storage is… In my case it is "C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile”. Odd, but true: Sadly, when i try to put the id_rsa file into that directory from my normal user session, it somehow doesn’t make it into the local system accounts profile.

From here you can open the git bash by running C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\sh –login –i

Then run cd ~ to switch to your home directory.

Then copy your id_rsa file here with a simple cp <id_rsa-location> .

Now run ssh git@bitbucket.org in order to try to authenticate and accept the host as known host.

For my current work on Azure integration for NPanday I’m investigating what the Azure Tools do with the Service Configuration (*.cscfg) on publish, since the file in Visual Studio it isn’t the same as one which is deployed along with the Cloud Service Package (*.cspkg).

The build & package part for Azure Cloud Services can be found in %Program Files (x86)%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Windows Azure Tools\1.6\Microsoft.WindowsAzure.targets

Find and copy

First, the build tries to figure out which configuration to build use as input by checking for ServiceConfiguration.$(TargetProfile).ccfg and ServiceConfiguration.ccfg, while$(TargetProfile) is “Cloud” by default.

As a part of the build, after being copied, the configuration file is augmented with more settings.

Add “file generated” comment

That was why I noticed, that the files are different. The comment in the target file makes it look like the file is generated from scratch, but instead it is just a copy which changed here and there. By default, the comment is the only change :)

Connection String Override

If ‘ShouldUpdateDiagnosticsConnectionStringOnPublish’ is set to true, the diagnostics connection string is overridden for all roles in order to prevent the default setting “UseDevelopmentStorage=true” to be published to the cloud.

This is one of the typical “Microsoft demo-ready” features. Most certainly you’ll have multiple role-spanning connection strings or settings that you’d like to change on publish, but this is the only one needed to get demos to run, right?

Corresponding parameters in NPanday

The most complex part in the build is the setup for profiling and IntelliTrace; currently we have no plans on supporting these in NPanday. We will rather just deploy from Visual Studio, in case we need profiling or IntelliTrace.

I still have to look at how RDP and MSDeploy can be added to the configured service configuration; for a first release of NPanday that may have to be done manually.

I’ll make it short: it’s a mess. You can’t use plexus container 1.5-tooling (with java annotations), if you have to load your components in a plexus 1.0.x-container – which is the case, if your components are utilized in a Maven 2.2.x Mojo. This is simply because plexus container 1.5.x uses “default” as a default role-hint, while NULL is the default in plexus 1.0.x.

But you can use the old tooling, plexus-maven-plugin. But by default it fails if it sees any annotation in your source code, because it uses a version of qdox that doesn’t know annotations yet.

Also, when generating the component descriptor it doesn’t merge with the manually defined one in src/resources (the new one does).

And since, by default, the merge-descriptors goal runs before descriptor (generate) goal, you have to do some back flips to get that running too.

Well here is a configuration that works. At least in my project. Today.